2. Stuttgart Roots

1. Introduction  |  2. Stuttgart Roots  |  3. Dialogue: From Bauhaus to American Minimalism  |  
4. Dialogue: Minimalism in European and American Contemporary Art  |  5. Neo Geo  |  6. "Review:
Reconsidering Form, Space and Line"

Early 20th-century works associated with the Stuttgart Academy and the Bauhaus are presented here. Stuttgart was then an important art center and Adolf Hölzel, who taught at the Academy from 1906 to 1918, was a pioneer of Abstract Art who already had taken steps towards abstract compositions in 1905 – prior even to Kandinsky.
Hölzel's teachings were influenced by his theory of the “primacy of artistic means,” which encompassed the isolation of color, line and surface as equal elements of the pictorial composition. As a teacher, he had intense exchanges with his students who gathered around him in the so-called “Hölzel Circle.”

Based on his teachings, many of his students became abstract artists and, like Hölzel himself, first used representation as a starting point, as can be seen in works by artists such as Willi Baumeister (11, 12, 13), Max Ackermann (7) and Ida Kerkovius (14). Otto Meyer-Amden (2) is a further example. Some of Hölzel's other students would later become revered Bauhaus teachers, such as Johannes Itten (4). He was Hölzel's assistant and later developed his famous Bauhaus pre-course based on his teachings. The Bauhaus artist Oskar Schlemmer also hailed from the Hölzel Circle (5, 6); and Josef Albers was one of Itten's students.